It’s impossible to approach Osgood Perkins’s Longlegs without addressing how starkly it wants to be The Silence of the Lambs. The mimicry is palpable in its basic set-up of a young woman FBI agent with a focused personality tracking down a mysterious serial killer; but also in its aesthetics, its harshness of tone, psychological preoccupations, and pursuit of vivid imagery. Perkins doesn’t hide from the influence clearly -both his protagonist and antagonist at various points even sport the hairstyles of their counterparts in the 1991 classic. And perhaps the evocation is to more strongly distinguish his film for a market in 2024. The closer it resembles something like The Silence of the Lambs, the less it resembles anything now.
Of course that poses a tricky needle to thread, which Longlegs doesn’t always do gracefully. A movie that hearkens back in style and opaque tension to a bolder breed of thriller, but does so through material and themes more dramatically flamboyant -in the process facilitating certain tenets that have lost their lustre and others that have even become distasteful. Yet Perkins applies his grit to elements of the supernatural regardless, and isn’t necessarily inept at doing so. However, their ultimate reconciliation is more baffling than chilling.
The film is set in the Pacific Northwest in the 90s, where novice FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is assigned to a decades-spanning serial killer case in light of her showing what appear to be clairvoyant abilities. The occultist killer, referred to as 'Longlegs', leaves Zodiac-style encrypted notes at each of the crime scenes -where whole families are found brutally murdered yet with no signs of any intruder ever having entered the home. The deeper she delves into the case the closer the killer seems to be to her, whether in her mind or not.
Grim and guarded and absolutely fascinating, Monroe's performance is one of the movie's most consistent strengths. She's been around in the horror scene for years now, but Longlegs fully allows her to come into her own, developing this character gifted with a very distinct set of neuroses. Lee is inscrutable and intense, drawn like a Stephen King heroine, as haunting as she herself is haunted; and though constantly moving in fear she is in every scene a figure of formidable gravity. Monroe takes to the role holistically, expressed in the hushed and laser-focused tenor to her body language; and as to her special abilities, there is a palpable dread always lurking beneath her wide and attentive eyes. Lee is that rare thing in a modern horror movie -a genuinely rich and memorable character.
But she exists against a context that isn't much of either -at least from a plot standpoint. The mystery around how Longlegs is committing these murders, and if he isn't, who is doing so in his name, is curious enough through much of the film, but it sets itself up fairly early for an underwhelming conclusion. New, seemingly tangential components keep being added. Lee and her supervisor Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) follow several clues intentionally left by the killer to a buried doll -highly sophisticated in design and with an empty metal ball in its head -both details Perkins encourages the audience to consider, but on top of the supernatural element already in play and a sequence at the front of the film in which a little girl in the 60s is startled by Longlegs at her farmhouse. And there's nothing wrong with the mystery having layers, but it does a disservice to that ostensibly grounded and heavy tone that Perkins appears to be going for. The Silence of the Lambs was after all relatively straightforward in its mystery, much more about the figures' psychologies than the twists and methods.
Clearly though, Perkins wishes for Longlegs to remain an enigma, and isn't concerned much with who he is or even what his motives are. Yet choices are still made that render him in practical terms deeply readable and anything but enigmatic. The problem would inevitably present itself, but Nicolas Cage and his usual aversion to subtlety trounces over it handily. Cage, it should be noted, is scary as Longlegs -though a heap of that comes from Perkins's techniques in the way he shoots him (it's especially effective in that early sequence where from a child's eye view you can't quite see him in profile). Cage pulls from his usual array of influences for this, such as expressionistic silent cinema and perhaps some classic horror monsters. However it can’t be denied the aesthetics he and Perkins cast the character in, involving bleach white make-up and pronounced lipstick alongside his hushed sing-song affect and erratic behavioural explosions, are very loaded. Perkins seems to be on some level aware of the optics, as he makes sure to avoid any indications in the text that Longlegs has any connection to gender diverse identities. But beyond the text, there are aspects of implicit transphobic caricature to this figure, in that vein of Dressed to Kill or Buffalo Bill or indeed Norman Bates -famously played by Osgood’s father Anthony Perkins, which is perhaps not irrelevant; and it’s more than mere coding. It comes down to irresponsible reference points (I’m sure Michael Jackson was another one for Cage) that result in a lot of his scenes being effectively dismaying, but only in their apparent indulgence in an antiquated archetype. Needless to say it is not a harmless act toeing those tropes.
Far more overtly present to Longlegs though and on the case pursuing him is his devil worship, and the movie’s take on that material overall is almost thrilling. It’s bizarre we’ve had two horror movies in the last month that feature Satanic Panic as a major theme, and Longlegs for its faults addresses it with more interest than MaXXXine, though in a far more literal way than expected. Perkins hints from fairly early on that the Devil is a real player here, and some of his illustration to that end is very creepy (this is one of the better Devil interpretations I’ve seen in a while). But what mystique there is, how it ties into the various tethers of the case, and indeed Lee’s relationship to it herself, diminishes with the movie’s major twist, which isn’t nearly as conceptually haunting as the well-calibrated tension leads one to believe. Even with a few vivid beats and substantial ambiguity to the resolution, it feels almost mundane. And certainly a lot of that dark realism to the tone fades away as Zodiac awkwardly becomes The Omen. It is a sense of omnipresent dread that Perkins intends the movie to leave you on -instead, it’s mostly apathy.
Perkins has a relatively strong sense of style, especially in the way he sets a mood and builds tension in subtle ways. Often, he stresses a danger just out of scope, a couple times framing Lee in solitary environments at the edge of the camera so that you’re all the more drawn to what might happen in the considerable empty space behind her. He uses a similar technique in his editing, such as cutting from the inside of a dark and desolate barn Lee and Carter are snooping around in to the open door and an empty night behind. To keep up that suspense he’ll throw in snap inserts in representation of Lee’s visions, frequently sharp images alluding to some clue she can’t quite figure out yet. It’s largely effective and spooky, which makes those issues in substance even more disappointing.
And so Longlegs exists in an unfortunate conundrum where the methods work more than the subjects, with the singular exception of Lee Harker and Monroe’s performance of her. It is a complex and artful movie, but one that doesn’t really come to anything materially in its storytelling, in spite of some promising details. And the tenor of Cage’s performance is ill-considered, from a tonal as well as a political standpoint. After a handful of movies that didn’t take off, Perkins got to this movie’s greater scope of attention through Neon recognizing his talent and providing him resources for a bigger platform. I wonder how it would’ve played if one of his previous ideas had been given that chance instead. Because Longlegs does make for a decent showcase of his talents, though I’d be hard-pressed to call it a good movie otherwise.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/JordanBosch
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch
Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jbosch
Comments
Post a Comment